Search form

Labour let us down yesterday: Laurie Penny reports from A&E

Sign Up

Get the New Statesman's Morning Call email.

It's 2am, and I'm sitting under a strip light in the emergency unit of my local hospital, waiting for the doctors to finish attending to a young friend of mine who attempted to end her life tonight. When the paramedics arrived, they told us she wasn't the first -- for many Londoners, it seems, something about the news or the weather today gave the impression that a crisis point has been reached.

Apart from a shoeless shouting drunk growling at the nurses to give him back his confiscated footgear, the waiting room is quiet, strewn with ill, beaten-looking people patiently waiting to be seen. The frontline NHS personnel staffing the emergency desk were rushed off their feet even before massive public-sector cutbacks were announced a few hours ago, but they're doing the best they can. Somewhere behind my head, a machine that goes 'bing!' -- Monty Python observed that every hospital must have one -- seems, at this hallucinogenic hour of the night, to be taking the slow, trembling pulse of the nation.

The people of Britain have been badly let down today. The poor, the young, the old, the tired, the unwell: we have all been let down. Not just by the Tories, who let us know what was coming with all the oily subtlety of side-street sleaze artists; nor by the Liberal Democrats, from whom nobody expected any more than the stern, funereal complicity that they delivered during today's spending review. No: the people have been let down by Labour.

In 13 years of meandering and hawkish leadership, it seems that the Labour Party has utterly forgotten what effective opposition politics are supposed to look like. If its collective response to the greatest assault on social democracy in living memory is anything to go by, Labour has also lost sight of what it means to be a party of the left.

After laying out the details of his economic shock doctrine, George Osborne glibly asked the shadow chancellor if he had any other ideas. With all the panache of a sixth-form debater, Osborne repeated the question: did Labour's new economic spokesperson, or indeed anyone on the Labour benches, have alternative suggestions for fixing the economy other than tearing up the Attlee settlement, throwing a million on to the dole and destroying welfare?

Alan Johnson did not answer. Instead, he stammered, he clucked, he flapped, he did everything but lay an egg in an apparent attempt to mimetically re-enact the chickenish behaviour of his party over the past few weeks. The shadow chancellor gave no answer because he has no answer; nobody in the Labour Party, it seems, has any answers. They have knelt down and swallowed the Tory narrative that this recession is all Labour's fault, rather than the result of years of systematic global financial deregulation with which every major political party in Britain and the US was until lately in agreement.

The strongest criticism Mr Johnson could find was to suggest that the planned cuts were a little 'ideological' in aspect -- which is a shame, because the left could really do with some alternative ideology to counterbalance the Conservative Party's determination to wage class war with a calculator, and right now the Labour Party can't seem to find its ideology with both hands.

The grim truth is that the recoagulated Labour Party has no ideology and no new ideas. It was Labour that began the privatisation and withdrawal of public services in this country; now, today, with the Blairite model of intermittently caring neoliberalism buried at the crossroads of global economic crisis with a repossession order through its heart, even a new leader seems to have done little to raise any life from the ashes of the Labour left.

Labour has no answers; not for Osborne, not for its supporters, and certainly not for the weary Hackney residents currently curled up in this NHS waiting room, wondering if they can afford to spend a pound on a hot chocolate from the machine. The teenage boy next to me has started vomiting noisily into a cardboard dish; a drowsy-looking young woman is bleeding into her seat, a trickle of dark fluid slowly seeping on to the floor while her nervous partner holds her hand. My friend still has not returned. Alan Johnson doesn't have an answer for her either, nor for the hundreds of thousands of people who have felt despair shove its chill fingers into our hearts tonight.

That Labour does not have any answers for us is a disgusting display of the irrelevance of Westminster politics to the lives of ordinary citizens. If today's pathetic equivocation parade is a benchmark for the next four years of Labour politics, we will have to look elsewhere to find a voice in the hard, cold months ahead.